Paris folded in half, and in half again. Penrose stairs and other Escheresque games. Noirish hotel hallways of mystery, with elegant, mysterious-skinny Joseph Gordon-Levitt slipping through them, upside down and sideways.
Dicaprio doing his bewildered, slightly battered man-of-honor shtick, leaving the impression of a hero who is just slightly too dim to have been tempted by the more outrageous possibilities of his situation.Ingenious ingenue Ellen Page as a graduate student in architecture--oh menace of overdue education loans and unsatisfiable culture claims! No wonder she sells out to the first faintly plausible employer who appears and lures her by destroying a cafe and pretending to take her seriously.
And French Oscar-winner lady Marion Cotillard playing that even more terrifying menace to chunky American manhood, a person who is both a wife and a European. A menace more terrifying then a Death Star wrapped in a failed iPhone wrapped in a ripe chunk of sub-prime mortage, buddy.
Oh, and Christopher Nolan's insane genius for helming movies about beautiful, damaged, guilt-ridden men, his love for Hitchcock's exploitative take on Jimmy Stewart, and dudes who may or may not have killed their wives (if only they could remember) and the downtrodden underdog geniuses like Nicola Tesla and The Joker.
If, like myself, you are a fan of the salty goodness of C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian, of Horatio Hornblower and Doctor Maturin and Captain Jack Aubrey, then you'll enjoy this story.
"18th-century warship found in Lake Ontario: British vessel carrying 130 sunk in 1780"
Eerie, moving, and yes, for a small set of history fanatics, fascinating.
Took nieces Brigid, Fiona, and Minna to see "Enchanted." It's the tale (if you haven't seen it) of a fairytale princess exiled from storybook-land into the cold, cruel real world, namely, New York City. It was charming for so many reasons, but especially for the scene where the heroine tries the Snow White tactic of "summoning the forest creatures with a song" bit and ends up with a swarm of Manhattan pigeons, rats, and roaches. Heh!
It's kinda of wild how we continue to be fascinated by retelling those primeval Grimm's tales out of the ancient European memory. By the time they're schoolchildren, our modern American kids already know this whole mythic set of icons out of the feudal village. Strapped into their SUV car seats, spinning the DVDs, traversing modern suburbia, they still imbibe this strange old mythos in which princesses and princesses, castles and peasants, dragons and witches, forests and wolves, swords and sorcery are a natural part of reality.
This year's Dislocation movie review is for Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood."
Heh, I noticed that in the entire year of 2007, my first year blogging, I wrote extensively about a movie precisely once--last winter's "Children of Men. " I think that dearth occurs partly because there are already a lot of awesome content about all things media in the world, and partly because I see most things on video donkey years after they come out in theaters.
But just to kick things off, I will get this out of the way in January . . .
TWBB kicks ass. Daniel Day Lewis gives a terrifying performance as Daniel Plainview, a 1900s oilman on a mission to tear carbon fuel wealth out of the womb of the desert. He achieves this through a convincing mix of bone-crushing labor and deft property grabs, mediated with an early incarnation of family-values and semi-psychotic threats.
I grew in a culture that had a severe hangover of mid-twentieth-century middle class repression and guilt. There were certain things we as a cultural group just were terrible at facing. Sex was one, of course. Class is another, that is to say, money, status, power--and their opposites. And another was, well, the future.
* Cheers, Arthur C. Clarke
